Wild Instinct

3

Late that night, long after Carpenter has brushed the burrs and stickers from Knight’s thick coat, and retired to his tent, Gale looks up at the stars and thinks about Bennet Tarlow. He seems to Gale to have been the perfect man: an upright, bipedal omnivore; intelligent; capable; hardworking; a prosperous survivor — and maker of necessary things. Homes and resorts. So, if there’s free will, how could Tarlow have possibly let himself be eaten in a park by a mountain lion? But if life is fated — authored by God or many gods or even just anonymously — what coldly detached architect had led Tarlow to the claws and fangs?

And Gale thinks of the old cat, out in this national forest doing the same thing that he’s doing — bedding down on a cool October night. Maybe thinking about Tarlow, too. Or more specifically, the taste of man, which was the cat’s first, most likely. Funny to eat a live human being without even a whisper of shame in you. “Funny” clearly not the right word. Neither is “shame.” The question in Lew Gale’s practical, law-enforcement mind is: Will he do it again?

A more pressing question in his human heart right now is: Who killed the Laotian men?

He thinks of Marilyn, his ex-wife, a bright young woman with tastes for the finer things far more developed and refined than his. A mismatch of ambitions and satisfactions. Not of attractions.

Just before sleep, Gale drifts into his darkest place, as he does most nights. Feels it gathering up his body and his mind, drawing him into a slow orbit. He looks down on the stark tan desert of Sangin Valley, the startling green poppy fields quivering with red blooms, the boulder-strewn Sangin River, the village with its dusty shops, the humble mosque, the school and the boys, only the boys, scurrying in and out. He sees the men he killed, some of them in bloodied traditional dresses and turbans and sandals, some in the somber gray-and-white tunics of the Taliban, some in baggy Western trousers, head wraps, and combat boots. Always bearded, their faces sun-darkened and deeply wrinkled, some with their eyes open, their expressions fierce and noble and resigned.

Tonight, as always, the last face Lew Gale sees is that of an old man, whom Gale had first noticed on a village patrol in the Sangin open-air market. He was buying vegetables. He looked directly at Gale. He had a fierce face, framed by a full white beard, and Gale guessed by his well-worn, white, high-top Cheetah sneakers that he must have walked some distance in them. Cheetahs were popular with the Taliban — and many Afghans who were not Taliban — for comfort and durability on the rocky roads and trails, and the fact that many Cheetahs were accented black, green, and red — colors of the Afghan flag. His gait and motions were slow and deliberate, befitting a man so old. Lieutenant Papini said that Cheetah Man was Taliban through and through, a local fucking hero, of course, a reputed sniper with at least ten Russian kills, and five British, and almost certainly one kill ten days ago — Private Chilcote — down by the abandoned village near the river.

The next evening, after clearing it with his sergeant, Gale sent up a surveillance drone to shadow Cheetah Man from a home behind a bakery, where smoke and men’s voices billowed from the security screen door. Gale watched the drone’s video on his satellite phone. When the old man was far ahead of him, Gale sent the drone back to the FOB and followed him on foot along a ridgeline, watching him through the powerful scope of his sniper rifle.

Five kilometers later, Cheetah Man disappeared into a dilapidated farmhouse far back from the trail. No screens on the windows, no door in the frame. The house was part of a small village that had been occupied by the British, and abandoned by them two years prior. The wind-blasted mud structures were roofless, the palm trees shrouded by brown fronds.

In the failing light, the old man walked briskly through the doorway and came out a few minutes later with a duffel over one shoulder and a rifle slung across the other. He disappeared into a mud-brick granary with a torn steel roof that overlooked a forking trail. Gale had circled this part of the trail and village on his drone printouts just last week, where Chilcote had been killed by an invisible sniper ten days prior. A village building? Gale had written in his impeccably neat hand. Rooftop but few roofs. Granary has elevation. A 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines fire squad had searched the village and found no one, no footprints, no evidence of a sniper having nested there.

The sun set and the cold crept up from the ground and Gale looked around for a place to call home. He was alone. He had a canteen of water, a couple of MREs, a survival blanket, and nineteen years of life in him. His basic training sergeant had quickly seen young Gale’s rifle skills and put Gale on a sniper’s track.

He spent two hot days and two cold nights alternately watching from and dozing in a smooth, body-sized divot in a rocky hill seven hundred yards from the village. His teeth chattered but the blanket seemed to help. As a boy, Gale liked hunting by himself for birds and rabbits and deer, but now, hunting alone for men made him feel edgy and exposed.

No one came or went from the dead village, or from the granary where the old man had gone. Through his rifle scope Gale saw the shooting slots chiseled through the thick mud walls. Three of them, all on the second story, all with different views of the trail. They were small rectangles, just big enough for a sniper to get his gun and the top half of his face through. They made for a tough shot, though he had once made one like it.

Gale got his look when the old man emerged from the granary just after first light on morning three, his rifle slung over one shoulder, his white, black, green, and red high-top Cheetahs happily bright in the advancing desert light.

The old man collapsed in a puff of dust and didn’t move.

Lew Gale’s heart was thumping hard and he felt the adrenaline coursing through him but his hands were sound and his fingers steady.

Five minutes later, in the growing light, Gale looked down at Cheetah Man’s craggy but somehow benign face, his flat black eyes, the blood that had jumped from his chest into his snow-white beard.

The gun slung from his shoulder had fallen loose beside him and Gale was astonished to see that it was an old shotgun, not a sniper’s rifle, not a rifle of any kind. Seeing the old man emerge from the farmhouse in the half-light with a gun, Gale had observed and presumed and assumed and failed to identify.

He took pictures on his phone.

Inside the granary he smelled the opium, noted the black-tarred hookah pipe, the plastic bottles of water, the scraps of food and paper wrappers already attracting mice. There was a mattress on the floor, heaped with dirty blankets and oddly festive pillows with purple and white piping, certainly handmade in Sangin.

Upstairs, Gale sat on a wooden chair and put his face to the sniper’s slots, one at a time, following the trail on which Private Chilcote died until it disappeared down toward the river. Up here the smell of opium smoke was stronger.

What we have here, thought Gale, is an old man with a bird gun stopping off for a few days of R & R.

Later, back in Sangin, Gale showed one of his pictures to a boy — a helpful occasional translator and village busybody. The boy told Gale that the dead man was Amardad, which meant “one who is immortal.”

“Why kill him?” asked the boy. “Amardad hunted birds, not men.”

Gale looked away.

Felt like time had stopped. The boy was young and slender and had straight black hair that fell almost to his eyebrows like a pageboy’s.

“It was a mistake,” Gale said. “In the dark I didn’t see he had a shotgun that shoots only a few yards. Not a rifle for killing men.”

“The man you wanted was Amardad’s brother, Ali,” said the boy. “He was the best sniper in Sangin. They look very alike, their wives got confused. He killed many Russians and British, then the British killed him. With a drone. Three months before you Americans got here.”

“Then who shot Private Chilcote on the trail by the abandoned village last week?” asked Gale.

The boy looked at Gale with a puzzled expression. “Anyone. Everyone. Not me! So can I come with you to America when you go?”

“We don’t do that.”

We don’t bring back the people who helped us.

Gale’s heart seemed to cough up some shameful, insipid stone, which caught in his throat and hurt violently.